University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

‘SEEKING THAT WHICH CANNOT BE FOUND’: CHIVALRIC AND GAELIC PRECURSOR TEXTS AS COMMENTARY IN THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING

EMERSON STORM FILLMAN RICHARDS

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2013

To Gainesville, Mordred, Aiden McInnerny, Chaucer, the Space Needle, Dante, T.H. & T.H. But not T.H.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In tenth grade, the boy I liked said, ‘Read The Once and Future King”. Ten years later, I found myself writing a thesis about The Once and Future King because T. H. White’s Arthurian legend, and his Mordred, impacted me so deeply. I would probably not be a medievalist were it not for T.H.White—I simply would not have known to be.

I am glad to have had the opportunity to work with Professors Terry Harpold and

William Calin. These men have supported my scholarly endeavors and labored with me to craft this thesis and my research process. Though Terry is not a medievalist, he took me and my project on, for which I am grateful. Professor Calin is probably UF’s best kept secret (from me at least). I am sorry it took me so long to find him, but I am so glad that I did. Both of these men have left indelible marks on me as a scholar and a person—I’m the better for having spent two years working with them.

In 2011, Professor Michael Cramer asked if I had anything to contribute to a panel at the

International Congress on Medieval Studies on the protean nature of chivalry. I said yes, and my thesis topic was born. Having presented this thesis as a conference paper, I should thank everyone who posed questions and in someway helped me mould this argument, most notably:

Professor C.J. Jones (Notre Dame), Lucas Wood (University of Pennsylvania), Professor Steve

Muhlberger (Nipissing University), and Sebastian Rider-Bezerra (Yale University).

Jacqueline Cox, of the Cambridge University Libraries, was beyond kind when she helped me track down records on White’s time in Queens College, Cambridge. When I saw

White’s name written in the registrar from the 1920s, and his grades, he suddenly seemed so tangible and human—an experience I had not yet felt as a scholar.

Thanks to Professor R. Allen Shoaf and Dr. Judy Shoaf, who made time for me and helped me work through ideas in this thesis. It has always a pleasure to talk about Arthurian

matters with Judy Shoaf. Professor Shoaf inspires me to continue my medievalist training. One day, I want to speak about Dante or Shakespeare the way he does.

To Matthieu Boyd, for reading this thesis, for telling me stories, for helping me to become a better scholar and for encouraging me to be that better scholar. To Julie LeBlanc, for joining me on this arduous journey of being a medievalist/celticist grad student. To Alex Flores for eating my food, being my best friend, and laboring to keep me sane. To Walton Wood for late-night balcony chats, lemurs and labyrinths, and for making me happy when things were awful. And to Brad Johnson, my bosom friend, who above all supports me unequivocally and who has heard more about medieval literature than he ever signed on for in high school. The amount of thanks I want to give to each of these brilliant people is rivaled only by the amount of my love that they deserve.

Finally, I thank Storm Richards and Jeanne Fillman-Richards for the time, the money and the love, support and food; I will return the love, I will return the food, but not the money.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 10

2 SEEKING LANCELOT ...... 23

3 GAELI CONCERNS ...... 35

4 LANCELOT, LORD TENNYSON & DUTY AS FATAL WEAKNESS, OR FINDING THAT WHICH CANNOT BE FOUND, A CONCLUSION ...... 53

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 60

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 63

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CW The Candle in the Wind

BM The Book of Merlin

IMK The Ill-Made Knight

OFK The Once and Future King

QAD The Queen of Air and Darkness

SS The Sword in the Stone

Vin. Vinaver edition of Malory

WW The Witch in the Wood

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

SEEKING THAT WHICH CANNOT BE FOUND’: GAELIC AND CHIVALRIC TEXTS AS COMMENTARY IN THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING

Emerson Storm Fillman Richards

May 2013

Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English

In the wake of his (now lost) thesis on the Arthurian material that is commonly called

Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur at Queens College, Cambridge, in the late 1920s, Terrence

Hanbury White was able to remark upon different representations of chivalry and courtliness in historical literatures. His tetralogy, The Once and Future King (1958), demonstrates his deep knowledge of the Arthurian tradition and related elements of medieval literature and culture. I propose that through the many versions of Arthurian legend figured in The Once and Future

King, in relation to changes in social perceptions of chivalry—as a code of courtly conduct and as a code of warfare—we can discern White’s responses to, and critique of, these codes. This thesis will consider White’s use of material reappropriated from traditions of the Arthuriad in

The Once and Future King to comment on two pressing political (and personal) concerns of his contemporary England—the imminence of World War II and the rise of Gaelic, particularly

Irish, nationalism in the early twentieth century. I focus on two Lancelot-related examples, and a series of ‘Gaelic’ examples, to suggest that White’s reuse of precursor texts is not a superficial pastiche of textual and cultural references, but a calculated selection of allusions meant to critique this and other contemporary issues in a sophisticated way. My work will attempt to

establish White’s Arthurian tetralogy in the canon alongside his peers, J.R.R Tolkien and C. S.

Lewis. I will accomplish this work of criticism in four sections.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The Once and Future King is the common title of the four books by T. H. White published in 1958. Three of the books had been published individually prior to 1958. Episodes from The Sword in the Stone (1938) were deleted for the 1958 publication. The most notable example is the Madam Mim vignette, which reappears later in Disney’s animated The Sword in the Stone. The second book, The Queen of Air and Darkness, originally published in 1939 as The

Witch in the Wood, underwent the most drastic changes of the tetralogy. After the 1958 edits of the second book, the number of pages was severely cut and many thematic elements were rent from the narrative, one being a more in-depth treatment of Morgause’s character both as a mother and as a woman. Stylistic and superficial textual changes were made to the The Ill Made

Knight, but the book remained, for the most part, the same as the 1940 publication. The final book, The Candle in the Wind, had not appeared in print before 1958. White intended that a fifth volume, The Book of Merlyn, should be published as a conclusion to The Once and Future King, but it was rejected by the publisher. The Book of Merlyn was published posthumously after revision and reorganization. I will consider primarily the text of 1958 tetralogy compilation, The

Once and Future King. When I refer to the individual books, it will be assumed that I am referring to the edited 1958 versions found within OFK, unless otherwise noted. I will take in to account the texts and variations between the 1930s versions and the ‘final’ 1958 version if there is a significant difference. For example, the variation between The Witch in the Wood and The

Queen of Air and Darkness is directly related to my analysis of White’s treatment of Gaelic concerns, so I will draw heavily from The Witch in the Wood. Though White considered The

Book of Merlyn to be part of his series, I will not discuss it in detail, though the larger arc of my argument remains cognizant of it—especially in lieu of White’s changing relationship to Malory

and his increased understanding and rejection of war. White wrote The Book of Merlyn after he had postulated that Malory’s work was essentially a treatise against war. Though I refer to The

Once and Future KIng as a tetralogy, I am aware that White technically meant for his series to be a pentology. Since the examples from which I draw occur in the second and third books, I focus on those two and incorporate material from the other three as it pertains to my main argument.

When he began work on The Sword in the Stone, White wrote to his mentor, Leonard

James Potts, on 14 January 1938, expressing confusion about whether he was writing a children’s book, or a more serious work (White qtd in Gallix 93).1 Both versions of The Sword in the Stone, featuring young Arthur’s adventures with talking animals, convey a serious political critique, but with a sense of whimsy befitting the representation of a young adult’s psyche.

Merlyn transforms young Arthur into various animals from whom Arthur learns about different types of government, such as fascism, monarchy and communism. To conclude his education,

Merlyn transforms Arthur into a migratory goose, whose familial flock, without boundaries or personal property, seems to Arthur the most idyllic. In the final chapter of The Candle in the

Wind, this ideal of borderlessness returns to Arthur as he critiques the failures of Camelot. To those without a background in medieval literature, the narrative of The Sword in the Stone, detailing Arthur’s adolescence, may seem a charming, if complex, story of “all things lost and wonderful and sad,” as the jacket blurb of a 1987 paperback edition heralds, pertaining chiefly to the novel’s primary audience, children and young adolescents. But there is more going here.

1 Retrieved from the Cambridge University archives, we learn that “Leonard James Potts …was employed by the University from 1926-8 as an Assistant Lecturer in the English Faculty and then from 1928-60 as a Lecturer in the English Faculty. He was a Fellow of Queens' College. It is the responsibility of the Colleges to organise small group teaching for their undergraduates and of the central University authorities to provide lectures and to set and mark examinations and award degrees” (J. Cox, personal correspondence).

Heather Worthington’s article on the tetralogy, “From Children’s Story to Adult Fiction:

T. H. White’s The Once and Future King,” considers the biographic style of the novels using the lens of White’s vexed portrayal of women. In terms of my argument, what is significant about

Worthington’s article is that she defends White’s stylistic choices that place his work in the genre of Young Adult Fiction, though I find this assessment not altogether convincing. White’s narrative matures as Arthur does; neither entity remains stagnant in development. Arthur’s pastoral adolescence is central to the first book, and so White’s tone reflects Arthur’s childhood innocence. But as Arthur matures, she observes, so do the tone and style of White’s narrator as he considers the more mature themes with which Arthur will have to cope; Worthington explains,“[t]he narrative structure which takes Arthur from childhood to maturity is paralleled in the textual structure” of the novels (Worthington 98). In fact, there is a marked difference in the tone of maturity between the 1939 version of The Witch in the Wood and the 1958 The Queen of

Air and Darkness. The Witch in the Wood shows progression in maturity from The Sword in the

Stone, but the presentation is less poignant than in the 1958 revision, The Queen of Air and

Darkness. The revision takes out much of Sir Palomides’ ornate and cloying dialogue (for example: “Thus is not it at all… Such unsleeping askings of questions interrupt educations, necessarily. Impossible get on with teaching young idea shooting, when continually interrupted”

[WITW 25]). But most importantly, The Witch in the Wood has far less to do with Arthur himself than does The Queen of Air and Darkness. While The Queen of Air and Darkness remains largely thematically the same as The Witch in the Wood (adolescence and sexuality, the Orkney

Brothers, King Pellinore’s relationship to the Questing Beast and the Queen of Flander’s daughter), the events that compose the plot are almost entirely different. The Witch in the Wood centers around Morgause’s indifference to her children and her erstwhile, vampy attempts to

seduce the married Sir Grummore and construct her various identities. White enumerates the

“character studies”, the different personas, that Morgause affects:

The Drunkard’s Wife (she had driven King Lot [her husband] to drink some time before); The Lonely Spirit, Voyaging through Strange Seas of Thought Alone; Martha (the one who had to do all the housework [ ) ]; Mary (the one who did not); A Wayward Soul, Impulsive and Unaccustomed to the World; The Female Sage; The Gay Spirit; The Idol of Society; The Outcast of Society; The Venus of Milo; the Ugly Duckling… (WITW 107)

And the list goes on. Much of White’s treatment of Morgause is omitted in the 1958 version, including this list and the explanation of how her nature was almost entirely superficial, as if she were acting for an audience (which is detailed throughout the 1939 version). When White describes the tragedy of Mordred (as a character) in The Candle in the Wind, he attributes part of it to Mordred’s similarity in performativeness to his mother. The turning point, that “evolve[s the narrative] from children’s stories to adult fictions” Arthur’s union with his half-sister, Morgause, which occurs at the end of The Witch in the Wood/The Queen of Air and Darkness (Worthington

98). Depictions of sexuality are more prominent in the second book(s), befitting a transition from childhood (The Sword in the Stone) to early adulthood and a shift to focus on Lancelot (The Ill- made Knight). An early foray into sexuality occurs in allegory, when the Orkney brothers lead a

‘virgin’ into the woods to help them catch a unicorn.2 Elizabeth Brewer corroborates the reading of adolescent sexuality into this section of the text. She notes that “White in his final version3 suggests by means of a subtle combination of dialogue and authorial comment the growing sexual awareness of the brothers, who are nevertheless not quite able to understand what is going on” (Brewer 65). Beyond the visual allegory (a virgin holding the horn of a unicorn), the experience is couched in double-entendres (“‘We could get the kitchen maid’, said Gawaine.

“We could make her come. We could pull her hair if she didn’t.” [WW 86]). This experience

2 Worthington also addresses the Orkney brothers, the unicorn and the virgin (Worthington 104). 3 This version, is of course, QAD, the OFK version of WIW.

concludes the innocence of the four Orkney children. This experience is surrounded by

Morgause’s seduction attempts, Saint Torealvac’s heresies (towards Mother Morlan).4 These awkward, half-euphemistic attempts at sexuality culminate with Morgause’s journey to Carlion where she sleeps with her half-brother, King Arthur. With this “sexual act, Arthur loses his innocence, and so does the text, and there can be no return to childhood stories” (Worthington

106). White concludes The Queen of Air and Darkness with a genealogical chart on which a majuscule ‘Mordred’ appears connected by the incestual lines from Morgause and Arthur. White claims that:

…this pedigree is a vital part of the tragedy of King Arthur… the narrative… deals with the reasons why the young man came to grief at the end. It is the tragedy, the Aristotelian and comprehensive tragedy, of sin coming home to roost. That is why we have to take note of this parentage of Arthur’s son Mordred, and to remember, when the time comes, that the king had slept with his own sister. He did not know he was doing so, and perhaps it may have been due to her, but in seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough. (QAD 312)

With this short discourse, he primes the reader to take a turn from talking animals and tutelage by saints and wizards towards the darker themes of incest, adultery, aging and the Fall of

Camelot. The two books after The Queen of Air and Darkness show “a closer adherence to the original tale penned by Malory” (Worthington 106). Along with this closer adherence to the medieval precursor text in the The Candle in the Wind, “there is no discursive space for childhood in this final volume” (Worthington 114). But most important for my argument, as the tetralogy developed White included, and alluded to, his Malorian source more faithfully, as well as Malory’s sources which, as Malory constantly reiterates in his works, include much of the

French tradition.

If we consider White’s references to the canon of chivalric literature, such as the French

Vulgate Cycle, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Malory, the representation of the canon

4 In QAD, the spelling of “Torealvac” reflects the Irish spelling system, “Toirdealbhach”.

and its argument become increasingly nuanced as The Once and Future King progresses. White’s pastiche is not a mere gathering of textual and cultural references, but a calculated selection of allusions and a modern critique of Arthurian chivalry. To demonstrate this, I will focus on

White’s representations of Lancelot, chiefly his reappropriations of four medieval sources: the late 12th century Roman de Rou by Wace and the contemporary Yvain, ou le chevalier au lion by

Chrétien de Troyes, the early 13th century La Quête du Saint Graal from the French Vulgate

Cycle, Songe d’Helain, d’Hector, et de Gaivain of the Post-Vulgate Cycle and the Sir Gawain chapter of Malory’s The Tale of the Sankgreal Briefly Drawn out of French Which is A Tale

Chronicled For One of the Truest and One of the Holiest That is in This World.5 Following my analysis of Lancelot, I will turn to the Gaelic/English tensions manifested in WW and QAD.

Here, White juxtaposes the Gaelic (Brian Merriman’s poem Cúirt An Mheán Oíche and the

Orkney Brothers themselves) with Malory’s anti-Gaelic works. Having used the Orkneys to show that these appropriated lines are ubiquitous throughout The Once and Future King—not merely a Lancelot-centric anomaly—I will return to Lancelot to explicate White’s intentions concerning chivalric codes, as evidenced in his use of citations from historically or thematically incongruent sources. I will argue that these lines are not merely inserted for aesthetics or convenience: rather, they serve as a subtle nod to more careful readers who may thus gain access to White’s critiques. By examining the medieval references of modern authors whose educations emphasize medieval literature, such as T. H. White and his contemporaries C. S. Lewis and J. R.

R. Tolkien, a modern scholar can perhaps better understand how the chivalry and the Arthuriad have come to be understood since the Middle Ages. Since White’s work is informed by (at least

5 Brewer notes that “White possessed several copies of Malory, [but] he seems to have worked from the Globe edition edited by Sir Edward Strachey, which he heavily annotated…. The Globe edition prints Caxton’s version of 1485…”(Brewer 211). Brewer catalogs, in addition to his Globe Edition, that White also had “the Dent Everyman edition of Caxton (1935); Arthur Pendragon, New York, George Putnam’s Sons, 1943; and Vinaver’s first edition of the Winchester MS, The Works of Thomas Malory, Oxford 1947” (Footnote 211).

some) research of primary texts (as documented by letters to Potts), tracing certain cultural traditions, such as chivalric and English/Gaelic tensions, through White’s fiction proves a more effective way of reading him than the use of other modern authors who may not have considered the antecedent texts.

My critical models are drawn from source criticism and adaptation theory. These two (not unrelated) schools of criticism nuance and inform my assessment of White’s use of medieval and

Victorian precursor texts. I begin with a consideration of source criticism. Much work has been done on source criticism relating to White’s contemporary, J. R. R. Tolkien. Since appreciably less scholarly work has been done on White’s books, it is not surprising that there is much less source criticism dealing specifically with his corpus. So, I will use Tolkienian source criticism as a template for my approach to White’s sources. Source criticism, however, is a controversial field in which “there has been too little understanding of the proper scope, limits, and methodology of successful source study, leading to many poor examples” (Fisher 2). I will follow the methodology and criteria set out by Jason Fisher, Tom Shippey and E. L. Risden in

Tolkien and the Study of his Sources. Scholars question the whether it is enough to be “satisfied with the soup that is set up before us”— that is “the story as it is served up by its author”— and to not desire “to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled” (1 Tolkien qtd in

Fisher). Fisher’s collection of essays deals with not only “the theory and methodology for proper source criticism” (2 Fisher), but also the praxis thereof. Fisher’s essay encourages those who engage with source criticism to “not simply point out that an author incorporates this or that source, but to try to explain why he might have done so” (30). In later sections, particularly section six, I will explore the cultural connection between C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and T. H.

White, but now, I will turn to Lewis’s academic writings. In a chapter “of a proposed work”

(Hooper viii), titled “Genesis of a Medieval Book,” White’s contemporary C. S. Lewis reminds his modern audience that “[t]he scholar’s ideal of accuracy in translation, the historian’s ideal of fidelity to a document and the artists ideal of originality, are all alike absent from the minds of

[medieval authors]… They seem to be enslaved to their originals…[but] they do not hesitate to supplement them from their own knowledge and, still more, from their own imagination” (Lewis

36). Medieval authors “freely modified and adapted [their sources] to their own purposes, to the demands of their selected form and to the needs of their time” (Fischer 33). With this in mind, derivative elements in the works of Tolkien and White, authors whose subject matter was medieval or pseudo-medieval, seem more in line with their motive and less as if the authors lacked originality.6 Risden’s essay summarizes much of the previous scholarship in general source criticism. He enumerates Harold Bloom’s “six patterns” of poetic influence or poetic revision in The Anxiety of Influence. Of Bloom’s six definitions, the patterns that best apply to

White’s interpretation of the Arthuriad are

Tessera, ... A poet antithetically “completes” his precursor, by so reading the parent- poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor has failed to go far enough. Daemonization, ... The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by stationing its relation to the parent- poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work. Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation which intends to attainment of a state of solitude...[the poet] yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including his precursor... (14-16)

Risden uses these paradigms to “consider…[the] critical method as we compare related texts”

(21). White’s work falls into several categories: tessera, daemonization, and askesis. The way in which the Arthurian legend has been transmitted since its inception lends itself easily to being

6 I do not wish to enter the fray over Tolkien and source criticism. I am not making a claim about Tolkien; rather, I am putting in to practice the theory of source criticism that focuses on Tolkien because it closely resembles the work that I must to do with White.

categorized as tessera. In most cases, each author adds or omits his or her own culturally or personally-driven detail, shifting the emphasis of the revision from the source legend or legends.

In this respect, the Arthurian legend is unstable—rarely does a character retain fixed characteristics or the narrative follow well-rehearsed plots.7 Though it originates in Wales, the

Arthurian tradition does not belong to one nation or group. Arthurian references and cycles became native to countries across Europe in the Middle Ages, and across the world in modern times. If we consider the variations of the legend after the Vulgate Cycle,8 in conjunction with

White’s claim that “the whole Arthurian story is a regular Greek doom, comparable to that of

Orestes” (White BM xi) and the comparison of the legend to an Aristotelian tragedy in QAD, then we can see more clearly White’s archetypal consideration of Arthuriana emerge.9 By defining the various archetypes of the Arthurian legend and adding to them, White submits his work to Bloom’s pattern of daemonization. White did not adhere to a strict representation of medieval Arthurian legend; he allowed his representations of characters and narratives to be influenced not only by precursor works but also by his idiom and psyche; as he observes of the

Lancelot character, his version of the knight reflects his own flaws (White qtd in Brewer 82, 83).

The Morgause character is clearly a representation of White’s feelings towards women, particularly his mother.10 Because of these additions to the precursor material, the narrative can

7 In a previous project, I have traced the mutations of the character Mordred from the first mention of him to the works of Malory. In doing so, I noticed how almost none of the cycles were static—even the most famous, such as the Grail Cycle and the Guinevere-Lancelot plot. 8 The versions of Arthurian legend that manifest after the Vulgate Cycle contain most of the elements more commonly associated with the modern conception of the legend: Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover, the Grail Cycle, the incestuous birth of Mordred. 9 By this, White most likely refers to The Orestia, not the play Orestes. 10 White admits this several times to Potts and refers to his revision of the Morgause character, which entails several different representations of femininity. He writes that has “chucked overboard all idea of building her on my mother, Lady Calcutta, the publican’s wife or etc. Instead she [Morgause] is now a pure melodramatic WITCH… who goes about boiling black cats alive and so forth” (White qtd in Gallix 122).

also be placed in the category of askesis. As Risden suggests, the critic benefits by understanding the type of the author’s revisions of his (or her) precursors.

More than recognizing that there is influence from precursor texts, what makes source criticism a viable approach to White’s novels is that it “combines… elements of historicism, biographical criticism and philology to determine how other works have somehow directed the course of those one is seeking to elucidate” (Risden 20). Along with source criticism, to understand White’s use of iteration and reiteration, we must turn to adaptation theory as well.

While Tolkienian source criticism is ready-made for delving into Medieval and mythological material, Lawrence Venuti’s work on adaptation does not address medieval texts, his methodology and the consideration of what adaptation is can also be applied to medieval literature. Lewis’s chapter, “The Genesis of a Medieval Book,” directly relates to the adaptation of medieval texts, and explains that what would be considered by modern authors to be plagiarism was common practice among medieval authors. Because of the recycling (and this term becomes complicated) of plots, characters and chunks of text, medieval literature is rife with adaptation of prior literary sources. The Arthurian legend is certainly no exception. Venuti’s observations on the hermeneutic logic of adaptation is particularly relevant to White’s case:

[t]he relation between such second-order creations and their source materials is not communicative but hermeneutic, depending on the translator’s or filmmaker’s application of an interpretant. The hermeneutic relation can be seen not only as interpretive, fixing the form and meaning of the source materials, but as interrogative, exposing the cultural and social conditions of those materials and of the translation or adaptation that has processed them. (Venuti 25)

When read alongside Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, Venuti’s model of hermeneutic second-order revision suggests that adaptations do not merely represent the Bloomian category of clinamen

(fixative, corrective): by understanding the specific role of the adaptor, we may better understand the culture and social imagination in which the adaptation and adapter belong. White

does not seek to ‘fix’ Arthurian legend, instead he suggests an understanding of the culture around the Arthuriad and chivalry by relating it to a contemporary audience and enhancing the understanding for those with a medievalist background. By examining adaptations (White’s examination of medieval adaptation, and my examination of White’s adaptations), we may discern elements in his version of Arthur that are “not only … interpretive, fixing the form and meaning of the prior materials, but … interrogative, exposing the cultural and social conditions of those materials and of the translation or adaptation that has processed them” (Venuti 41).

Venuti argues that this mode of analysis is a relevant methodology for considering the culture of the adaptor as well as the culture of the adapted text in that

…the application of an interpretant in establishing the new context is never simply interpretive, but potentially interrogative: the formal and thematic differences introduced by the translation or adaptation, the move to a different language and culture or to a different cultural medium with different conditions of production, can invite a critical understanding of the prior materials as well as their originary or subsequent contexts, the linguistic patterns, cultural traditions and social institutions in which they were positioned. (Venuti 38)

The idea that White engages in a process of hermeneutical adaptation, attuned to his contemporary historical moment and the medieval culture of France and England as represented in their vernacular literatures, informs my argument as I consider from which texts, and for what reasons, White drew his source material. Variation in the adaptation of material “is overdetermined by the cultural situation and historical moment in which the adaptation is produced” regardless of whether or not the artist “intends to intervene in political struggles or to take sides in social divisions” (Venuti 27). We must remember that though Venuti considers filmic adaptation of literatures in his article, here, his general theory of adaptation remains relevant to White’s tetralogy. Film directors adapting literature are very similar to medieval authors adapting the literatures of their predecessors. Both artists are expected to produce more or less faithful adaptations of prior material, and to adapt that material to the specific medial

contexts and constraints of the new work; this is not considered plagiarism or intellectual theft.

In fact, in some cases, the more faithfully reproduced the adaptation is, the more critical praise it receives. For a medieval example of this, consider the work of monastic scribes who were tasked with creating replicas of illuminated manuscripts; this was not considered a mindless task of copying (in the modern sense) but rather a high artistic endeavor. Although both translation and adaptation typically claim to be the “‘carrying over’ of some irreducible set of features or qualities from one text to another” (Venuti 29), this ‘carrying over’ is tinged and distorted (as

Venuti proposes, almost beyond the artist’s conscious decision) by influences of the artist’s psychology and by the artist’s contemporary culture. This is manifest in White’s reappropriations of his sources. Each of the original texts reflects something about its own culture that is lost, or irrelevant, in the culture of its adaptation; however, for an artist like White, a student of previous cultures laboring to critique both the past and contemporary culture, the literary symbolism and cultural meaning invested in these pre-existing works is not overlooked. White himself acknowledges in a 1938 letter that his work “is packed with accurate historical knowledge and good allusive criticism of chivalry… which nobody but you [his mentor, Potts] will notice”

(White qtd in Gallix 87). The Once and Future King can be enjoyed by a reader with no background in medieval studies; his or her interpretation may not be the same as that of a reader who does have a background in medieval studies. This is “the context of reception… through which the source text continues to accrue significance when it begins to circulate in its originary culture” (Venuti, 29).

In order to discern what White intended to achieve with his adaptations, we must understand, as John Crane has noted that, “White… has felt no compulsion to remain true to anything in the traditional Arthurian legend which did not suit his fancy” (77). White tailored

allusions to, and quotations from, his Arthurian precursors to fit the needs of his narrative and commentary. Since his version of the legend is also a multi-layered response to subjects ranging from contemporary politics and governments, to Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalists, to medieval ideas of chivalry and courtly love, it served him to make multi-faceted allusions to precisely critique those subjects. References that seem at odds with the notional character of a knight, or with the tradition, from which the knight comes, are, in fact, pointed. White’s ‘fancy’ in these cases was driven towards a specific narrative with specific undertones and subtexts.

CHAPTER 2 SEEKING LANCELOT

The first Lancelot-related example shows the depth of influence embedded in Arthurian texts, simultaneously providing White’s view of chivalry in the Middle Ages and in his own time. The Ill Made Knight begins with Arthur’s voyage to France to recruit the young Lancelot to join his “Order of Chivalry…which goes about fighting against Might” (316). Lancelot explains to Arthur that his Order of Chivalry is called “Fort Mayne in France”—which references the

French fort mains—and that he accepts Arthur’s offer but he, Lancelot, “must grow up first”

(316). White enters the 19th century tradition of le mal anglais with the mismatched gender, la main being feminine, and the adjective fort referring to a masculine. Additionally, the multiple

Old French definitions of main (“hand, human body, power, authority, safeguard, condition, people, dwelling, and lodging” [Calin, personal corresp.]), complicate the meaning of this phrase.1 Regardless of the exact translation, Lancelot refers to the French version of Arthur’s contemplation of Might and Right. As White describes the beginning of Lancelot’s training, he directly and indirectly alludes to (at least) five medieval texts, Roman de Rou, Yvain; ou le chevalier au lion, La Quête du Saint Graal of the Vulgate Cycle, Songe d’Helain, d’Hector, et de

Gaivain of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and the Sir Gawain chapter of Malory’s The Tale of the

Sankgreal Briefly Drawn out of French Which is A Tale Chronicled For One of the Truest and

One of the Holiest That is in This World.2 White explains the significance of dreams “seven hundred years ago—or it may have been fifteen hundred according to Malory’s notation” (317), and then describes a dream that Lancelot has after Arthur left. Lancelot and his brother, Ector

Demaris, “got out of [their] chairs and were mounted on two horses. Lancelot said: ‘Go we, and

1 Le mal anglais can also be seen in the title bestowed upon the works of Malory. Le Morte D’Arthur contains a mismatched gender between the article (masc. sing. or plural) and the noun (fem.). 2 Commonly, the collective Arthurian works of Malory are known as Le Morte D’Arthur; however, this title technically only refers to the final book of the collection.

seek that which we shall not find’” (317). In the dream, Lancelot is beaten and despoiled and made to ride an ass instead of a horse, culminating in a scene at a Tantalus-esque well— a portent for the ultimate failure of Camelot and the chivalric Round Table. What concerns us here, however, is the precise text of Lancelot’s speech because ‘that which shall not be found’ is a stereotype that can be found in at least three precursor texts, which White thus brings to the fore in Lancelot’s pursuit of chivalric perfection. This quest for chivalric perfection will vex

Lancelot, and though he will be considered by others to be the best of Arthur’s knights, he will remain plagued by self-doubt and self-denial. His quest for ‘that which cannot be found’ is made explicit later, after he has slept with Elaine. He laments,

[w]hen I was little… I prayed to God that he would let me work a miracle. Only virgins can work miracles. I wanted to be the best knight in the world. I was ugly and lonely. The people of your village said that I was the best knight in the world, and I did work my Miracle when I got you out of the water… You have stolen my miracles. You have stolen my being the best knight” (IMK 376).

Once the allusions are recognized, Lancelot’s pursuit of becoming the best knight—which is the goal he sets when he is shown to have gotten out of his chair and on to the horse seeking that which he could not find during his chivalric training— becomes analogous to the Graal/Grail, as well as chivalric adventure, and an otherworldly tale, which is unattainability made manifest, both undercut and enforced by the knight’s very words. These allusions are particularly important because they occur when Lancelot is first introduced, thereby establishing his character and ideals. That which cannot be found shifts from adventure and marvelous things (in

Wace and Yvain), to the unattainable ‘Grail’ (in La Quête, the Post-Vulgate and Malory), to the unattainable notion of medieval chivalry and courtliness (in White). White almost certainly intended this line to iterate Malory, given the significance of other references credited to Malory throughout the quadrology. For example, he dedicates the 1938 version of The Sword in the

Stone to “Sir Thomas Maleore, Knight” and concludes The Candle in the Wind with Arthur

instructing young Tom of Newbold Revel.3 White wrote to Potts to ask, “do you remember I once wrote a thesis on the Morte d’Arthur? Naturally, I did not read Malory when writing the thesis on him, but one night last autumn I got desperate among my books and picked him up…”

(White qtd in Warner 98). White is reported to have venerated Malory after that (Warner 100).

Despite White’s obvious reference to Malory, it is important to acknowledge and consider

Malory’s sources, which form a backdrop to White’s reuse of Malory.

Tolkien wanted scholars to be satisfied with the ox soup, and not dig around for the bones. Source scholars must always be critical about deciding whether something is a source or not. The examples I will present, which were translated directly from five different but culturally related sources, are too similar to be coincidental. Venuti proposed that the author’s culture

‘overdetermines’ the way in which he or she uses source material and, in the same way, the

‘original’ author’s culture overdetermined the production of source text. My argument examines how White’s time and culture were involved in his decisions to allude to specific medieval texts.

By considering a brief survey of the scholarship of French and English, which informs the academic culture from which White came, we can see that White’s setting was involved in informing his work. A History of Arthurian Scholarship, edited by Norris Lacy, enumerates and explains various aspects of Arthurian scholarship from early sources to current ones, ranging from chapters on national literatures to international subjects (such as the question of an historical Arthur). T. H. White studied at a time during which English and (particularly) French

Arthurian literature was advancing as a legitimate field of inquiry. To give a temporal frame of reference, White “matriculated… in [Cambridge] University, on 22 October 1925, having been

3 By inscribing the though-fictional young Thomas Malory with this place of origin, this signifies that White ascribed to the biography of Malory written by George Lyman Kittredge (whose placement of Malory’s origin is Newbold Revell near Warwickshire), as opposed to Alfred T. Martin, who researched a Malory of Papworth St. Agnes in Huntingdonshire.

admitted to Queens' College... He was awarded a lower second class part in the examinations for

[the English] tripos in 1927 and a first in the examinations for part II of the same tripos in 1929...

He graduated BA on 18 June 1929 and MA , by proxy …on 5 February 1944. He was absent from Cambridge for the academic year 1927–8 (source: UA Graduati 12/251)” (Jacqueline Cox).

Before “the nineteenth century, Old French literature was the domain of gentlemen amateurs” (Busby & Taylor 96); however, White was a student during the period in which and after which Old French literature moved from amateur status to being considered of scholarly worth. Equally important, around the same time as the canonization of Old French literature,

“Malory’s Morte [became] widely accessible in scholarly formats” (Dalrymple 142). Slightly before White entered Cambridge, H. Oskar Sommer’s seminal seven-volume Vulgate Cycle

(published in 1909 through 1913) not only provided scholars with the complete Lancelot-Graal

Cycle (Busby & Taylor 96), and aided the understanding of this material by calling it a unified cycle. Before Sommer’s publication, scholars had assumed that the books which would comprise the Vulgate Cycle were non-cyclical. Though in modern institutions, “general studies of medieval Arthurian romance, its themes and characters, usually begin with consideration of

French”, this was not facilitated until Sommer’s text (Busby & Taylor 95). After Sommer, the discovery of the Winchester manuscript of Malory’s Arthur in 1934, and other seminal events in

Arthurian and medieval scholarship, White had access to materials that were unavailable to previous Arthurianists and medievalists. Despite White’s access to the Winchester manuscript version of Malory, Brewer proposes that, “[h]e seems to have had little or no interest himself in the earlier Arthurian literature out of which Malory had fashioned Le Morte Darthur, nor in the discovery of the Winchester MS of Malory’s Works in 1939” (Brewer 211). Kurth Sprague expresses the same opinion, that, in terms of Malory’s source material, White “simply wasn’t

interested in them” (Sprague 58). Moreover, there are the “ill-tempered broadsides he levels at them [Malory’s sources] en masse in his unpublished notes on Malory” (Sprague 58). And, yet, the influence of these previous versions and of the contemporary scholarship of Arthurian legend are embedded in White’s text— ‘overdetermining’ the significance thereof.

There is evidence for rejecting the claim by Brewer and Sprague about White’s disregard for the Winchester MS and previous versions of the Arthur. First, Sprague does allow that

“rather than simply being ignorant of Malory’s sources, White may have found nothing in them that would assist in achieving his artistic purpose of characterization and motivation; they were too distant” (58). Brewer acknowledges that “White possessed several copies of Malory, [but] he seems to have worked from the Globe edition edited by Sir Edward Strachey, which he heavily annotated…. The Globe edition prints Caxton’s version of 1485, which until the Winchester

College MS was discovered was the only version known, and which is still the basis of the

Everyman and Penguin editions” (Brewer 211). Brewer catalogs, that in addition to his “…

Globe edition, edited by Sir Edward Strachey, London, Macmillan 1899,” White also had “the

Dent Everyman edition of Caxton (1935); Arthur Pendragon, New York, George Putnam’s Sons,

1943; and Vinaver’s first edition of the Winchester MS, The Works of Thomas Malory, Oxford

1947” (Footnote 211). Sprague provides the detail that White’s Vinaver Malory was “in the language of the catalogue…‘in very good condition with its dust covers in tact and pages uncut”

(Sprague 49). Though White owned only one book “out of more than four hundred books” that was “concerned with Arthurian literature of criticism,” Sprague also concedes that it is “risky business to try to judge a man’s interests from looking at his books” (59). Despite Brewer’s assertion about White’s disinterest in earlier Arthurian legend, White himself wrote to Potts to encourage his mentor to not “forget that this [OFK] is The Matter of Britain! Look at this short

list my lad: Nennius, Geoffrey [assumedly of Monmouth], Malory, Purcell, Hughes, (Milton),

Tennyson, T. H. White. You could treble it, but I am mentioning the important ones”—he even playfully lists himself among these authors (White qtd in Gallix 120). White’s marginalia in

From Ritual to Romance by Jesse L. Weston, “marked some sentences relating to Malory’s sources which evidently helped to suggest the possibilities open to him at this stage in his epic.

He refers to the two main strands of medieval French prose romance about Lancelot. One is the courtly Lancelot and the other is the Queste…which is fundamentally anti-chivalric and anti- courtly and emphasizes Lancelot’s sinfulness. It was towards the Queste that his sympathies lead him” (Brewer 86). At the same time, White did not have a high opinion of Weston’s work (noted by his marginalia cited in Sprague [59]). It appears that White had, at least, a passing interest in the precursor texts. The rhetoric of a 20 June 1947 letter to “Pöttes” (an affectionate nickname for his mentor) confirms that White had an interest in precursor texts, which was satiated. He writes:

I don’t think it’s much good my worrying more about Mallory’s sources or manuscripts [this was after the Winchester was discovered and made public knowledge]. I’ve done too much of it already, for a ‘creative artist’. I knew quite a lot about his [Mallory’s] habit of tacking sources together without caring whether they fitted … and I’d rather not know any more, or I shall become a ‘critic’ instead of a ‘creative artist’… (White qtd in Gallix 200).

But in writing The Once and Future King, White became both a critic and an artist. The academic culture—Cambridge in the 1920s— bristled with possibility for a young man who wanted to study medieval and Arthurian literature. Though Sprague takes the end of The Book of

Merlyn to counter argument that White was somewhat knowledgeable of—if not amiable about—Malory’s sources, the final pages devote themselves to a brief outline of various national representations of Arthuriana, ranging from the Italian, the Scots, the Germans (specifically

Wolfram von Eschenbach) and a whole host of Arthurian critics (BM 135). The final point of

evidence that White was neither apathetic to nor ignorant of Malory’s sources occurs in a letter to Potts in which he remarks that he conflates the two Elaines in to one because he “thought that

M. [Malory] may himself been muddling his sources in this matter” (White qtd in Gallix 114). I take this to mean that White was at least familiar enough to critique Malory’s knowledge of his sources.

It would be a major research undertaking in itself to trace the cultural significance and driving force behind the medieval transmission of the variant of the phrase ‘seeking that which cannot be found.’ My treatment of the medieval will be more philologically-driven at this point. I will consider the philological similarities between Wace, Chrétien de Troyes, the Vulgate Cycle, and the works of Malory which are manifest in The Ill Made Knight—I will not attempt at this point to describe how or why this line resonated from Wace through to Malory.

Having established the cultural frame from which White worked, I can consider the philological similarities between the five texts from which Lancelot’s seeking of ‘that which cannot be found’ resonates. A chronological analysis begins with the twelfth century Norman poet, Wace, and his Roman de Rou. Wace writes of the forest Brecheliant,“donc Breton vont sovent fablant4” (line 6374, p. 121).5 He describes, with in the forest, the fountain of Berenton at which there is “le perron;/ aler i solent veneor/ a Berenton par grant chalor,/ E a lor cors l’eve espuisier/ E le perron desus moillier;/ por ço soleient pluie aveir;/ Issi soleit jadis ploveir/ En la forest e envirun” (6378-6384, 122).6 This, of course, anticipates Chrétien de Troyes’s implementation of a magic stone, upon which Calogrenant and Yvain pour water to summon the

Otherworld. Chrétien is not the only medieval author to borrow the scenario wherein there is a

4 All translations henceforth are my own, unless otherwise noted: “of which Breton have often told tales”. 5 The modern spelling is Brocéliande, which is the modern day Breton forest of Paimpont. 6 Trans.: “a quarried stone;/ and there in the past, hunters/ went to Berenton [the fountain] due to a great heat/ would draw up water in their hunting horns,/ and moisten the top of the stone/ because of this, it used to rain/ for this, often in the past, it rained/ in the forest and the [surrounding] region”.

fountain in the Brocéliande that causes rain; Frappier lists “Giraldus Cambrensis (Giraut de

Cambriae), Guillaume le Breton, [and] Thomas Cantimpré” (41). Wace acknowledges the

Otherworldliness of the forest, by citing the Bretons’ claim of fairies inhabiting the woods. The magical qualities of the forest concern my argument less than the narrator’s statement that “La alai jo merveilles querre,/ Vi la forest e vi la terre,/ Merveilles quis, mais nes trovai,/Fol m’en revinc, fol i alai;/ fol i alai, fol m’en revinc,/ Folie quis, por fol me tinc” (6392–6399, 122).7 The narrator, here, enters an Otherworldly space, to seek (querre) marvels, but finds none. He is seeking that which cannot be found, and that quest made him a fool and made him recognize himself as such. Jean Frappier indentifies this passage from Wace as a potential source for

Chrétien de Troye’s Yvain. Wace’s Brut (as well as the Historia regum brittaniae of Geoffrey of

Monmouth) presents an account “à la vérité et à la gravité de l’histoire et écartent de parti pris les ‘merveilles’, les ‘auventures’, les ‘fables’ des conteurs bretons (Wace se contente d’y faire une allusion à-demi dédaigneuse)” (Frappier 38).8 Yvain’s connections with Wace and Geoffrey indicates that, more than Erec, more than Lancelot, more than Perceval (who “n’ont connu tel honneur” [Frappier 38]),9 he “était l’un des héros arthuriens les plus fameux et les plus anciens”

(Frappier 38).10

In Chrétien’s Yvain, Calogrenant acts as the catalyst for the narrative by recounting his adventures at an Otherworldly spring. Having recently arrived at Arthur’s court, Calogrenant narrates his encounter with a hideous peasant, who asks him what he is seeking. In response,

Calogrenant identifies himself as “… uns chevaliers/ Qui quier che que trouver ne puis; Assés ai

7 Trans.: “I went here to see marvels [marvelous things]/ I saw the forest, and I saw the country,/ Marvels I sought, but I did not find./ Foolish, I returned, foolish, I went./ Foolish I went [and] foolish I returned/ I sought foolishness [foolish things], consequently, I recognize I was a fool.” 8 Trans.: “…of the truth, of the seriousness of the account [of] the ‘marvels’, the ‘adventures’, the ‘fables’ of the Breton story tellers (to which Wace contents himself with making a semi-contemptuous allusion [to the Breton storytellers])”. 9 Trans: “… have not enjoyed such an honor”. 10 Trans: “… was one of the most known and most ancient Arthurian heroes”.

quis et riens ne truis” (Romanz 722. 365-6).11 The adventure on which the peasant sends

Calogrenant involves the knight pouring water on a stone, which causes a great storm and summons an Otherworldly knight who defeats Calogrenant and takes his horse. The philological and thematic similarity with Wace is evident. Later in Calogrenant’s tale, Chrétien has the knight cite Wace again, saying of his journey in to the forest, “Ensi alai, ensi reving;/ au revenir por fol me ting” (Kibler 24. 578-9).12 Lancelot’s claim, in White’s account, echoes Calogrenant’s self description with only a difference in verb tense and person number. Lancelot is seeking that which he shall not find; Calogrenant is seeking that which he cannot find. And what Calogrenant seeks is “aventures, pour esprouver/ Ma proeche et mon hardement” (723. 360-1).13 It is important—not necessarily for my argument at hand, but for the future examination of the medieval transmission of this line—that “la fontaine de l’Yvain est située en terre celtique”

(Frappier 40)14 and that terre celtique is removed in the next iteration of the line.

Now, we can turn to La Quête du Saint Graal of the later-composed Vulgate Cycle. The link between the two texts is philologically, if not thematically, evident. Norris Lacy provides the historical context that “between 1215 and about 1235, an anonymous author, or group of authors composed the Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also called the Vulgate Cycle, the Prose Lancelot, or the

Pseudo-Map Cycle)” (ix). Within a century, the anonymous authors of the Vulgate Cycle appropriated Calogrenant’s experiences into Hector’s dream sequence. In this dream, “lui

[Hector] et Lancelot del Lac, son frère, descendoient d’une haute chaiere et montoient sor .ii. granz chevax, et disoit li .i. a l’autre: Alons quierre ce que nos ne troverons ja” (Bogdanow 386-

11 Trans. : “…a knight, who seeks that which I cannot find; enough [or, plenty] have I sought, and I find nothing”. 12 Trans.: “Thus I went, thus I returned;/ Upon returning, I considered myself a fool.” 13 Trans.: “adventures, to prove [his] bravery and [his] strength”. 14 Trans: “…the fountain of Yvain is situated in a Celtic landscape”.

8).15 What follows is a description of how Lancelot fell from his horse, was despoiled, and came upon a fountain “la plus bele qu’il onques viest”.16 He tries to drink from it, but the water retreats from him, so he “retornoit la dom il est venuz”.17 In this instance, that which will not be found is the Saint Graal.

Likewise, in the Songe d’Helain, d’Hector, et de Gaivain from the Post-Vulgate Cycle, that which cannot be found is the grail. In the Post-Vulgate, Arthur is the central figure, as opposed to the Lancelot and Guinevere focus of the Vulgate Cycle (Lacy xi). Difficulty arises in working with the Post-Vulgate Cycle in a philological way because “some portions of the Post-

Vulgate have been lost; others are known only in fragmentary form or through early translations into Spanish or Portuguese” (Lacy xi). Lacy provides that “what we have of the cycle has been largely reconstructed, especially by Fanni Bogdanow” (Lacy xi). It is Bogdanow’s reconstruction from which I draw:

Esta visam vio Galvam, mas Estor vio outra mui maravilhosa e dessemelhada desta, ca lhe semelhava que elle e seu iraão La[n]çaroc deciam de huã cadeira e sobiam sobre dous cavallos grandes, e diziam huũ ao outro: --Vaamos buscar o que nom poderemos achar ja. E asi adarom per muitas jornadas, tanto, atee que Lançaroc caya do cavallo e derribava- o huũ homem, que depois fazia sobir em huũ asno, e espia-o da rroupa e de quanto lhe achava. E depois sobia no asno e andava asi longo tempo, ataa que chegava a hũa fonte, a mais fremossa nem a mais saborossa que nunca vira, e decia hi por bever, e hu queria bever, fgia-lhe [a] agoa. E quando vi[a] que lhe fugia, tornava-sse pera donde viera.18 (Bogdanow 205-206)

15 Trans.: “he and Lancelot du Lac, his brother, descended from a high chair and mounted on two big horses, and said to each other, one to the other: Let’s go to seek that which we will not find”. 16 Trans.: “…the most beautiful [fountain] that he had ever seen”. 17 Trans.: “… returns [to] the place [from which] he came”. 18 Trans. Marsha Asher: “This vision Gawain saw, but Hector saw another, marvelous and different from Gawaine’s, for it seemed to him that he and his brother Lancelot came down off a single chair and got on two large horses. They said to each other, “Let’s go seek what we won’t be able to find.” Thus they rode many days, until Lancelot fell off his horse and a man knocked him down, then made him get on a donkey, stripping him of his clothes and everything he had. After he had got on the donkey, he rode for a long time, until he arrived at a spring, the most beautiful and desirable he had ever seen. He dismounted to drink from it, but when he tried to drink, the water receded from him. When he saw that it receded from him, he returned to where he had come from” (Lacy 155). I rely on Asher’s translation from Norris Lacy’s edition of the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycle.

This instance from the Post-Vulgate Cycle actually reveals another precursor text. Songe d’Helain, d’Hector, et de Gaivain is one of the fragments that is not available in the original Old

French, so Bogdanow used the Portuguese fragment in her piecing together of the cycle. Thus, we can rightly assume that some version of the line ‘Let’s go seek what we can’t find’ resonated from the Old French to the Portuguese translators. In addition, in both the Old French Post-

Vulgate and the Portuguese (re)iteration, we see the same scenario wherein Lancelot falls from his horse and is made to ride a donkey. The symbolism of the chevalier who is deprived of his cheval and made to ride the inferior âne should not go unnoticed.

Semiotic extensions of the key line—associating it with the grail, the ass, and the spring— carry over from the French Vulgate and Post Vulgate Cycles to Malory’s work.19

Though Malory’s representation of this passage is translated from French to English, he uses the same Grail-context from the Vulgate Cycle and the same narrative framework for the line spoken by the two knights. In Ector’s vision, “hit semed hym that hys brothir, sir Launcelot, and he alyghte oute of a chayre and lepte upon two horsis. And the one s[a]yde to the other, ‘Go we to seke that we shall nat fynde.’ And hym thought thatt a man bete sir Launcelot and dispoyled … and sette hym upon an asse” (Vin. 559).

To a reader unfamiliar with medieval literature, Lancelot’s derivative declaration in The

Once and Future King would seem like a casual observation about the trials of chivalry, with no notable significance. However, to a medievalist aware of the intertexts involved in this case, the textual and historical resonances of the line must complicate a literary interpretation of White’s version of Lancelot and his quest. The use of the borrowed line can be read in three registers.

19 A further remark on the cultural significance of the relations of these medieval precursor texts: from Wace to Malory, in each of the five (or six) precursor texts that I have presented, besides the line about seeking that which cannot be found, the other resonant trope is the spring that Wace originally describes in the Broceliande forest. Further research and literary and cultural analysis of the relationship of these texts might show how this spring, deriving from the Celtic-Otherworldly forest, came to be closely associated with the setting of the Grail.

First, the statement is, frankly, opaque—Lancelot is seeking that which cannot be found. He is a knight. Knights go on quests, but how the quest might end seems not to be at stake. The second register depends on our recognition that this line is lifted from a medieval text telling the story of a very different knight. The intertextuality in this case gives Lancelot a sort of medieval wrapping, making him seem as if he is a more authentic representation of chivalry, because he speaks with the voice of an historical representation of knighthood. As I will show later,

Lancelot’s genuinely medieval nature is doubtful, or at least more complicated. The third register relates to the other two, in that recognition of precursor texts leads us to understand the incongruity of these texts and, therefore, the strange artifice, even emptiness, of Lancelot. The way in which White uses precursor texts (occasionally mentioning the source, occasionally directly appropriating without mentioning the source) resembles the way in which medieval authors used their source materials (such as Malory’s own use of the “Freynshhe Booke” [Vin

676]). While the use of this technique alludes to an authentically medieval narrative and seems to lend a verisimilitude of medievalness to Lancelot, in fact it initiates the critique of the Graal-like unattainablity of medieval and modern chivalry that White will pursue throughout the tetralogy.

Combined with White’s use of the analogy of chivalry as a Holy Grail-like entity—that which cannot be found—White’s commentary on chivalry becomes clear. I submit that this emptiness of Lancelot functions metonymically as a form of critique of the foundations of chivalry. In the end, it does not matter if White had direct knowledge of these texts. He certainly would have had no knowledge of the French or Portuguese version of the Post-Vulgate Cycle.20 But the fact is,

White tapped into this pedigree of semiotic resonance, used it to inform his iteration of Arthurian legend.

20 In Bogdanow’s compilation of the Post-Vulgate, it is stated that “publication proposée à la Société [des anciens textes français] le 24 juin 1971. Approuvée par le conseil dans sa séance du 15 mai 1985…”

CHAPTER 3 GAELI CONCERNS

This significant reappropriation of medieval material is not Lancelot-specific. At this point, I will turn from Lancelot- and chivalry-driven examples to suggest that White consistently uses precursor texts to inform and nuance his characters and criticism, and that this technique was not limited to Lancelot’s character. By understanding White’s uses of precursor texts, scholars might begin to address White outside of the realm of young adult fiction and consider his work in a more serious, scholarly light. White emphasizes his interest in Irish material alongside his struggle with the concept of the role of Chivalry in martial Might and Right in his letters to Potts. Because of this personal interest, another prominent example of textual reappropriation for thematic criticism occurs within White’s representation of the Orkney clan—

Gawain, Gaheris, Agravain, and Gareth.

In this section I must necessarily consider The Witch in the Wood and The Queen of Air and Darkness equally. Both sequel books provide an exegetical narrative of the childhood of the

Orkney Brothers and their relationship to their mother, Queen Morgause. Both narratives, despite significant differences, are thematically joined and conclude with the linchpin of Arthurian tragedy. And both books provide a paradigm for understanding White’s conception of the culture of Ireland and Scotland. During a time of increased Gaelic nationalism and pan-Gaelic embrace of national identity and struggle, the views of an educated Englishman with (occasional) Irish sympathies and a pacifist leanings prove to be significant to an intertextual reading of the tetralogy.

White’s life in Ireland began as a fishing trip with a friend and turned in to six and a half years of living on a farm with Mr. and Mrs. McDonagh in Doolistown (Gallix 93). Gallix and

Brewer describe White’s interest in the Gaelic culture. Brewer provides that “[a]s a compulsive

learner as well as teacher, White had interested himself from the beginning of his stay in Ireland in the language, history and customs of the country... He also tried to investigate the folklore of

Inniskea in the west of Ireland” (Brewer 10). Gallix couches it that “White had to do as the

Irish—… claimed to be Irish himself because his father was born in Ireland, said his rosary with the McDonaghs every evening before going to bed and almost converted himself to Catholicism”

(Gallix 96). On 2 July, 1939, White wrote to Potts to inform him that he was “learning Irish seriously—pretty good at my age, dont [sic] you think?” (White qtd in Gallex 100). Later, 1

August 1939, White concludes his letter to Potts with a blessing in Irish, equivalent to God,

Mary and Patrick be with you (Gallix 104). These letters and analysis of White’s life harken back to the idea of source criticism being a useful paradigm from which to consider White’s work. Source criticism necessarily includes biographic detail—White’s depiction of Ireland and

Scotland and the concerns of the Gael is significant, not haphazardly thrown into his work, because it was significant to him personally. And yet, for his interest in and education on the culture and language of Ireland, White succumbs to a cultural tradition that frequently neglects or misrepresents Gaelic peoples. For example, White wrote to Potts on 22 December 1943 of his hosts, the McDonaghs: “They are slightly more incompetent than their neighbors, but it is mainly just that they are Irish. The thing partly comes from the race, but it’s more from the climate. I sleep two hours more a night than I used to do in England, and my brain has become a sort of gas-mask—the part you breathe through” (White qtd in Gallix 136). He then goes in to a short foray on the concept of race, positing that

it is fashionable in England at present to say that there is nothing in it [race]—to spite Hitler—but there is. There is a kind of racial volcano, either in Germany or Russia or further east, and this is constantly welling up with new races, who have new weapons. They push the older races out-wards, like lava from a volcano, until they spread to the sea rims and can’t go further. All the prehistoric cultures of Europe are on the rims of Europe, pushed out from behind—Lapps in North, Celts

in Brittany and Sicily, Minoan bullfighters in Spain, etc. Well, we are the last rim of all over here [in Ireland], and here we have the débris of every inefficient pre- historical culture which has been smashed by the volcano in four thousand years. (137)

What White describes is the notion of the Celtic Fringe, a term which came in vogue in late-

Victorian years (Heyck 43). Michael Hechter explains the concept of the Celtic Fringe through the lens of sociology. Citing Ferdinand Braudel, he states “Geography helps us rediscover the slow unfolding of structural realities, to see things in the perspective of the very long term”

(Braudel qtd in Hechter 49). Hechter applies this point to the socio-cultural demographic of

Britain, where “there is a radical split down the middle… which sharply divides the island into two geographically distinctive areas”: the highlands and the lowlands (51). In an admitted

(though educated) generalization, “highland settlements are relatively pastoral, depopulated, poor and backward; in contrast the lowlands tend to be relatively cultivated, populous, wealthy, and culturally advanced” (Hechter 50). In the British Isles, “[e]ach Celtic region is in fact dominated by highland territory. Given the choice of high land or low, most groups would not hesitate to prefer the latter. So it was for the Celts …The problem for the Celts was that all the subsequent invaders of Britain shared their preference for land” (52). This is a very brief glossing of the geographic and cultural notion of the Celtic Fringe, but it will suffice to demonstrate the cultural sources of White’s (and the English culture’s) denigration of the Irish.

White’s alternation between loving and disliking Ireland (Gallix 94) seems to indicate a struggle to escape the anti-Irish (and anti-Gaelic) racism in the academic culture, the political culture and the quotidian culture that would have been inherent for an Englishman in the early

20th century. As modern scholars, we must remember that, like in modern universities, White’s professors at Cheltenham College and Queens College, Cambridge, would have presented many different academic perspectives, including post-Darwinian interpretations of racial identity that

were common in this period. Anthony Wohl, points out that, in light of evolutionary theory,

“…in much of the pseudo-scientific literature of the day the Irish were held to be inferior, an example of a lower evolutionary form, closer to the apes than their ‘superiors’, the Anglo-Saxons

… Certainly the ‘ape-like’ Celt became something of an [sic] malevolent cliché of Victorian racism” (par. 2). Wohl also notes that

John Beddoe, who later became the President of the Anthropological Institute (1889-1891), wrote in his Races of Britain (1862) that all men of genius were orthognathous (less prominent jaw bones) while the Irish and the Welsh were prognathous and that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who, in turn, was linked, according to Beddoe, to the "Africanoid". The position of the Celt in Beddoe's "Index of Nigrescence" was very different from that of the Anglo-Saxon. These ideas were not confined to a lunatic fringe of the scientific community, for although they never won over the mainstream of British scientists they were disseminated broadly and it was even hinted that the Irish might be the elusive missing link!” (par. 2).

Apes and Angels by L. Perry Curtis traces the different social reasons and repercussions of the racial characterizations of the Irish from the mid-nineteenth to late nineteenth century. The

English view of the Irish transformed from “the stereotypical Irish Celt of the mid-nineteenth century, from a drunken and relatively harmless peasant in to a dangerous ape-man or simianized agitator [which] reflected a significant shift in the attitudes of some Victorians about the difference between not only Englishmen and Irishmen, but also between human beings and apes”

(Curtis vii). This view held by ‘some Victorians’ was published in “England’s largest newspapers” which “allow[ed] no occasion to escape them of treating the Irish as an inferior race—a kid of white negroes [sic]—and a glance at Punch [a satirical magazine published in

England in the mid-nineteenth century] is sufficient to show the difference they establish between the plump and robust personification of John Bull and the wretched figure of lean and bony Pat” (Gustave de Molinari qtd in Curtis 1). The racist treatment of the Irish “was entertained by educated and respectable Victorians who thought in categorical terms about the

so-called races of man” (Curtis 1). Towards the later Victorian period, the 1860s and 1870s, the

“‘representative Irishman’ was to all appearances an anthropoid ape. Among the forces that accelerated Paddy’s degeneration was the assumption that there were qualities in Irish Celts which marked them off as a race or breed quite distinct in looks and behavior from those who claimed Anglo-Saxon, Danish or Norman ancestry in the British Isles” (Curtis 2). Though this is not the immediate culture which informs White’s writing, it is the culture from which his own developed. We must think back to how the originary culture overdetermines an author’s approach to his or her writing and Weltanschauung. This is not to say that White had been completely indoctrinated with racist ideas about the Gaels, but certainly the Anglo-Saxon and

Anglo-Norman (English) culture by which he was educated and in which he lived must have influenced his opinion. This oscillation is manifest in his books, particularly the sequel books, and, of course, he makes use of precursor texts to express and complicate these issues already complicated by his contemporary culture.

Before I begin my treatment proper of White’s Gaelic concerns, I must explain the terminology that I will use and that White used to describe Celtic-language speaking peoples of

Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany. ‘Gaelic’ is the adjective and

‘Gael’ is the noun that White uses almost exclusively to describe these languages and peoples.

The descriptor ‘Celtic’ is mentioned only twice in The Once and Future King. The first occurrence is in the third chapter of The Queen of Air and Darkness, Merlyn labors to explain the political gravity of the situation between him, as a Norman king (QAD 229),1 and the Gaelic confederation, which consists of “five new kings, which makes them eleven altogether… They

1 “‘So it comes to this,’ he [Arthur] said, ‘that we Normans have the Saxons for serfs, while the Saxons once had a sort of under-serfs, who were called the Gaels—the old Ones. In that case I don’t see why the Gaelic Confederation should want to fight against me—as a Norman king—when it was really the Saxons who hunted them, and when it was hundreds of years ago in any case’” (QAD 229)

are Clariance of North Humberland, Idres of Cornwall, Cradelmas of North Wales, Brandegoris of Stranggore and Anguish of Ireland” (QAD 229). Merlyn asks Arthur if he “even know[s] what a Gael is? Some people call them Celts” (QAD 228). “‘A Celt,’” responds Arthur, “‘is a kind of battle-axe’… surprising the magician with his piece of information…For it was true, on one of the meanings of the word, although Arthur ought not to have known it” (QAD 228). Merlyn corrects Arthur (“Not that kind of Celt” [228]), and explains that he means “the people. Let’s stick to calling them Gaels. I mean the Old Ones who live in Brittany and Cornwall and Wales an Ireland and Scotland. Picts and that” (228). The second instance of ‘celt’ is in chapter seven of The Ill-Made Knight, where it is used to describe Sir Carados and Sir Turquine, “two knights on the borders of Wales” who are “of Celtic stock” (IMK 341). But, these knights, particularly

Sir Turquine, were “not noble”; in fact, “these two conservative barons had never yielded to

Arthur, and they did not believe in any form of government except the rule of force” (341).

Specifically, White uses adjectives such as “wicked,” and says of Sir Turquine that “if he had lived now he might even had been locked in a lunatic hospital, and his friends would certainly have urged him to be psycho-analysed” (341). This is not a flattering portrayal of ‘Celtic stock.’

And of course the anachronism of White’s Norman King Arthur must be recognized; the historical (and even a fair amount of the literary representations of) Arthur supposed him to live around 540 A.D, which is nearly 1000 years before the Normans invaded the British Isles.

Additionally, White omits and edits part of the Tristram and Lamorak thread of Malory.

Tristram, a Cornish knight in contention with Lancelot for the position of le plus preux chevalier, becomes a mention in White. Meanwhile, the White’s relationship with the Gaels (and his portrayal of the relationship between the Gaels and the Galls, as he couches it) is complicated by his portrayal of Lamorak. White omits the Malorian descriptive surname, ‘de Galys,’ which

Sprague attributes to the possibility that “White knew that recognizing Lamorack as an ‘Old

One’ would vitiate his notion that ‘the Old Ones’ had murdered Lamorak” (Sprague 51). So,

White reduces the Gaelicness of one of the preeminent knights in order to emphasize the wickedness of the Gael when Agravaine kills him for sleeping with Morgause. The associations—with a battle-axe and with rowdy knights—contradict Arthur’s goal (and White’s unattainable chivalric ideal) of the Round Table and Might for Right.

But what is the difference between ‘Celt’ and ‘Gael’? Why does Merlyn insist Arthur stick to calling them Gaels? To answer this, we turn to the Oxford English Dictionary which defines Celt as historically “[a]pplied to the ancient peoples of Western Europe, called by the

Greeks Κελτοί, Κέλται, and by the Romans Celtæ” (“Celt”). The meaning of the word changed over time and the OED provides a second definition as “[a] general name applied in modern times to peoples speaking languages akin to those of the ancient Galli, including the Bretons in

France, the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx, and Gaelic of the British Isles” (“Celt”). Though linguistically driven (“the name Celt has come to be applied to any one who speaks (or is descended from those who spoke) any Celtic language”), the OED allows that “it is not certain that these constitute one race ethnologically… Popular notions, however, associate ‘race’ with language, and it is common to speak of the ‘Celts’ and ‘Celtic race’ as an ethnological unity having certain supposed physical and moral characteristics, especially as distinguished from

‘Saxon’ or ‘Teuton’” (“Celt”). The term ‘gael’, according to the OED, is less linguistically- derived and defined simply as “a Scottish Highlander or Celt; also, an Irish Celt” (“Gael”). The adjectival form provides a little more detail in that ‘gaelic’ is “[o]f or pertaining to the Gaels or

Celtic inhabitants of the highlands of Scotland; occas. in wider sense, pertaining to that branch of the Celts which includes the Scottish Gaels with the Irish and Manx” (“Gaelic”). What is most

significant about these two terms, ‘Celt’ and ‘Gael’, is their origins: ‘Celt’ has a Greek word origin; ‘Gael’ comes from Scottish Gaelic (Gaidheal) and Old Irish (Gaidel, Goidel) (“Celt”,

“Gael”). Since Merlyn instructs Arthur to ‘stick to calling them Gaels,’ perhaps he was alluding to this discrepancy in etymology.

One final point about race, Gaelic concerns, and White must be made in order to set the cultural scene to support my larger argument concerning White’s responses to contemporary politics mediated through reappropriations of 19th century and medieval texts. In a personal correspondence, Judy Shoaf pointed out “[a]fter WWII, there was a tendency among the English to want to redefine themselves as not-German after all, and at that point King Arthur became immensely important, a hero who was definitely British but not Germanic (in fact he fought the

Germanics)”. This race-driven use of Arthurian legend as propaganda is similar to Geoffrey of

Monmouth’s nationalistic use of the legend in the 1100s. Race and ethnicity are shifted around in the Arthurian legend to serve author’s own nationality and national needs. White conveniently forgets that Arthur is Celtic (of Celtic-language speaking peoples) and recasts him as Norman; the Orkney Islands and people are culturally closer to Scandinavian than Scottish—a fact that

White chooses to ignore entirely. White’s assignment of race is peculiar, he “saw Arthur neither as a ‘distressed Briton hopping about in a suit of woad in the fifth century,’ nor as a Romano-

British dux bellorum, not even as a Celtic chieftain” (Sprague 55). Rather, White’s concept of the race of his characters plays out like this:

The [England] of this idealized century was inhabited by Normans (Galls), who had come over with Uther, by Saxons, and by Old Ones (Gaels). The Normans, of whom Arthur is one, comprise the chivalric aristocracy who, with their Games- Mania and ritualized forms of warfare, act like fox-hunting squires of the nineteenth century. By their unthinking brutality under Uther, they have oppressed the Saxons, who actually have preceded them in England, and have kept them as serfs in the posture of a subject race…The Old Ones, who were in England

centuries before either the Normans or the Saxons, have been harried to Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland and Brittany. (Sprague 56)2

My address of White’s Gaelic concerns in this section will be divided into three areas.

First, I will look at White’s use of the Germanic language, Scots (or Ulster Scots) in The Witch in the Wood which was subsequently omitted from The Queen of Air and Darkness. Then, I will consider the prologue of The Witch in the Wood, which consists of an extended passage directly lifted from Malory (without acknowledgement of the source), and concluded with two lines in untranslated Irish from Brian Merriman’s poem, Cúirt An Mheán Oíche or The Midnight Court.

White’s representation of the Gaelic concerns is more heavy-handed in The Witch in the Wood than in the still ostensibly Gaelic-driven Queen of Air and Darkness from which I will draw my final point of Section III. The final treatment of White’s Gaelic interest will be in my analysis of the incongruous use of Malory’s text in the first chapter of The Queen of Air and Darkness. In this example, White interpolates Malory’s (very English) words, slightly modernized, into the family history of the Orkney Brothers as they instill an anti-Anglo-Norman (anti-King Arthur) sense of duty into each other.

In The Witch in the Wood, much of the text describes the adolescence of the Orkney brothers, who frequently go to St. Torealvac for stories and education. When the children ask the saint to “tell [them] about Queen Maev3, who wanted the bull” or “dance [for them] one of the jigs”, Mother Morlan laments, “Maircy on the puir bairns, to think of his holiness dancing a jig”

(WW 30).4 This is one of the first examples of White’s use of Scots in this sequel book. I will parse a few of these lines to prove these dialogs mix Scots and English, and are not merely, as

Brewer posits a dialect representation of “a Scottish accent” (Brewer 115). The following

2 White’s anachronistic setting is such that “the action in [The Once and Future King] takes place between the beginning of the thirteenth century and the end of the fifteenth: from about 1200 until possibly 1485” (Sprague 55). 3 Of the Irish epic Taín Bó Cúailnge. 4 This episode is retained in The Queen of Air and Darkness, with the Scots intact (QAD 237).

information appears in the dictionary, Lallans: A Selection of Scots Words Arranged as an

English-Scottish Dictionary, with Pronunciation and Examples, in the entry for puir: “‘poor’-

Spoken puir. Spelt, puir. A puir man is fain o little.—Scots saying. U puir maan iz fain oa luttul”

(Jarvie 90).5 Jarvie defines bairn with the plural spoken bairn-z and written bairn-s as “child, children” (23). As an example, Jarvies provides “[a]uld folk are twice bairns. Auld foak ur tweis barnz” (Jarvie 23). However, the use of English is also noted in Mother Morlan’s diction. When

White does use Scots, it is usually in this fashion—mediated by English. I imagine this is so that it is intelligible to his readership that is not familiar with the language. A little later in this scene,

Mother Morlan adds to St. Torealvac’s oration about the doctors of Connor Mac Nessa, “[w]urra the doctors…Hoots, but they’re na canny” (WW 32). Alexander Warrack’s dictionary gives several definitions for hoots: “Hoot, Hoots, int. an excl.[emotion] of doubt, contempt, irritation, dissatisfaction. – v. to pooh-pooh, discredit” (270). Na is defined as, among other parts of speech, and adverb of negation “not” (Warrack 372). Canny proves to have a more complex meaning. Canny, Cannie is an adjective which embodies the meaning of “cautious, prudent, shrewd; artful, crafty, dexterous; careful, frugal…”, the definition continues to include

“fortunate… endowed with supposed supernatural knowledge or magical skill; good, worthy”

(Warrack 71).

St. Torealvac appears use a mix of English, Scots (Lallans) and Ulster Scots (Ullans).

Telling a story to the Orkney Brothers of King Connor Mac Nessa, he recounts that the king, due to the brain-bullet in his skull, could not become excited so “he [was] not able laugh nor fight nor take any small sup of spirited water nor look upon a white colleen anyhow” (WW 32).6 The

5 Of these sentences, while identical in meaning and diction, the first shows a normalized spelling, and the second shows a more traditional Scots spelling. 6 Sprague mentions this in his overview of White’s sources, stating that the story comes from “a story included in Cross and Slover, but White has taken pains with it, putting it into an Irish idiom befitting St. Toirdealbhac” (65).

word of interest in this passage is colleen, which C. I. Macafee defines in A Concise Ulster

Dictionary as “a girl; young woman [hiberno-English from Irish cailín]7” and provides alternate spellings, “collyeen, cailin” (71). Colleen does not appear in the Scots dictionaries from which I am working. The saint interjects “begor” into his story (“Well, begor, it was a fine state of business, as you can imagine” [WW 32]). This word can be broken down into two constituent parts “be” and “gor” to form a mild oath of “By God” (Robinson 240).8

During the games which Morgause sets up in order to seduce Grummore, Mother Morlan rants loudly and a by-stander exclaims “Doon wi’ the noisome hagwife” (WW 137), providing yet another example of Scots, worthy of examination. Doon, which, granted, could be White’s representation of Scottish dialect, is defined by Warrack in its verbial form as “to upset; to overthrow; to throw in wrestling” etc (139). Noisome is an adjective meaning noisy (Warrack

382). The use of the noun hagwife grants more insight to Mother Morlan than is ostensible to those unfamiliar with Scots. The Scots meaning of this word is “midwife” (Warrack 240), which is probably from where she derives her honorific Mother.

The final Scots example from The Witch in the Wood I will examine is a four-line poem by Sir Palomides, a knight of King Arthur’s court visiting the realm of Lothian and Orkney with

Sir Grummor and King Pellinore. The poem reads

Hoots, Toots, Hoots, Toots Will ye no come back again? Hoots, Toots, Hoots, Toots, There’s no discharge in the war. (178)

Here, the Anglo-Indian Sir Palomides speaks lines of poetry from the nineteenth century

Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” and the eighteenth century Lady Carolina Nairne’s “Will ye no come

The citation for the “Cross and Slover” to which Sprague refers follows: Cross, Tom P, and Clark H. Slover. Ancient Irish Tales. New York: H. Holt, 1936. 7 The bracketed material is Macafee’s. 8 I would like to thank Sebastian Rider-Bezerra for point this out to me.

back again” (also titled “Bonnie Charlie’s Noo Awa’”). The post-colonial implications are rife in this intertextual juxtaposition of Anglo-Indian nature of Kipling and Palomides and the Jacobite allusion and Scots of Nairne, a coupled with White’s own Mumbai birthplace and Irish self-exile.

The complexity of these allusions to colonial and post-colonial identities can be simplified, in the same way that White seemingly conglomerates the Gaelic nations. Through this patched-together poem (which was omitted in The Once and Future King), White equates the struggles of

Scotland, Ireland and India against the Empire of England with each other.

The use of Scots is not limited to The Witch in the Wood. In the first chapter of the Queen of Air and Darkness, Gawain and his brothers “were whispering in Gaelic. Or rather, they were whispering in a strange mixture of Gaelic and the Old Language of chivalry—which had been taught to them because they would need it when they were grown. They spoke little English”

(QAD 214). White renders the boy’s dialog as English for obvious reason. Though Gawaine’s speaks in syntactically stilted way (“Long time past, my heroes… before ourselves were born or thought of, there was a beautiful grandmother at us, called Igraine” [QAD 214]), he speaks

English. However, later in the tetralogy, Gawaine speaks in a manner that is distinctly influenced by and incorporative of Scots, for example, “Ach, God… if but I hadna siclike waeful passions”

(CIW 528). Though Brewer dismisses the use of Scots as that “while at Arthur’s court in later life

Gawaine speaks with a Scottish accent” (Brewer 115), Sprague, who “studied with the Celticist

Ruth Lehmann” (Sprague 7), recognizes that “Gawaine does indeed speak ‘braid Scots’” (66). It is not the rendering of a Scottish accent, and White even embeds this fact in The Queen of Air and Darkness, explaining that “[i]n years later, when they [the Orkney Brothers] were to speak

English perfectly—all of them except Gawaine, who, as head of the clan, was to cling to a Scots

accent” (QAD 214, emphasis is mine). Sprague, however, does not find particular significance in this use of Scots. He recognizes it, he cites it in his article, and then dismisses it by writing

unfortunately, ‘braid Scots’ is not in any way related to the speech of the Gaelic Highlands; it is simply the old Northumbrian dialect with a later overlay of Scandinavian… If White were aware of the options that were open to him, he gave no indication of it. It s one of the anomalies of TOAFK that White himself was unaware of many [dialects] that he had included, and the inconstancy of his dialect between Queen and Candle is one such example. (66)

Just before this dismissal, Sprague cites the passage that I cite (“…were whispering in

Gaelic…”), describing this as an equation White has made “between the ‘Gaelic’ spoke by the children and the ‘Scots accent’ which Gawaine clings to” (65). The rendering of the Orkney

Brother’s stilted English is “more Irish than Scottish, reminiscent really of the fabricated

Kiltartan brogue employed by Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, and others in their production for the

Abbey Theatre in Dublin” (Sprague 65).

And that is the point to which I would draw attention. Like his seemingly idiosyncratic use of previous versions of the Arthurian legend, White blends Gaelic cultures (granted, mostly

Irish and Scottish), not out of ignorance, but in order to nuance his characters, plot and socio- cultural criticism. There are many more examples of Scots throughout The Witch in the Wood and a few in The Queen of Air and Darkness. It would be a worthy scholarly endeavor to consider each of White’s uses of Lallans and Ullans analytically, both in terms of what a scholar can discover about the text (for example, Mother Morlan’s occupation) as well as the use of the language(s) in the early 20th century.

The introduction of WW provides a platform for White to gather and rework his precursor texts so as to comment on contemporary England and Gaelic tensions. In terms of race, White does some reassigning. The Orkney Isles are more culturally Scandinavian than Scottish; however, White neglects this fact and instead interpolates Irish qualities into his ‘Scottish’ clan.

The clearest example of this Irishification of the Orkney Brothers occurs in the prologue of The

Witch in the Wood. The prologue begins with Arthur in Carlion and “thither came to hym [sic]

Lot’s wife of Orkney… and she came richely beseen with her four sons, Gawaine, Gaheris,

Agravaine, and Gareth” (v in White, 27.38-9 in Vin.).9 Merlyn then reveals to Arthur that he has slept with his sister and introduces him to Igrain, his mother. This incest that produced Mordred,

White believed, was the key to the tragedy of Arthurian legend. White concludes this excerpt from Malory with a couplet in Irish, “Caithfidh an neart gan cheart do strícoadh/ Is caithfidh an ceart ‘n-a cheart bheith suidhte” (WW vii), which comes from Merriman’s Cúirt An Mheán

Oíche, a non-traditional aisling written in the late 1700s to satirize the state of gender relations in

Ireland at the time. The line translates to: “Might without right must give way, and right must be established in its proper place”. 10 White’s interests converge in this conglomoration of Malory and Merriman. In the direct translation,11 we see the theme of Might giving way to Right—the goal of the Round Table. We can also see the blending of an overtly Gaelic reference with the

English Malory, a technique that White will reintroduce in QAD, and the significance of which will be borne out further when I look at the use of Malory in The Queen of Air and Darkness.

There is certainly more to be said about White’s use of Cúirt An Mheán Oíche. Declan

Kiberd provides that Merriman was not the first poet in the 18th century to ‘parody’ the conventions of the aisling. Put simply, aislingí are poems in which the narrator naps in a pastoral setting and is beset by a vision in which a woman, representing Ireland, appears to the dreamer to prophesize about the state of the country. The other poets did not “use it [the parodic aisling] to

9 The original Malory reads: “And thydir come unto hym kynge Lottis wyff of Krkeney…and she com rychely beseyne with hir four sonnes, Gawayne, Gaheris, Aggravayne and Gareth”. 10 I thank Professor Matthieu Boyd for his translation of this line for me in personal correspondence. 11 This is less apparent in the 1926 translation by Percy Ussher, who renders the lines “[t]o find the fittest among the throng/ To learn the right and requite the wrong” (20), or in Noel Fahey’s more modern translation as “[t]he powerful desist from inflicting wrongs/And justice enthroned where it belongs” (lines 125, 126). Frank O’Connor’s 1945 translation lends itself a little more to allowing White to extract “might and right”; O’Connor translates the lines thus: “Make might without right conceal its face/ And use her might to give right its place” (17).

create anything new or strange. Merriman alone managed to do that” (Kiberd 183). Merriman was “indifferent to the cause of nationalism in just those years when it was taking its modern shape”, but what is significant about his poem is that “he transformed the inherited myth to propound radical ideas about the needs of the body for an unfettered sexual life” (Kiberd 183).

Through Kiberd’s statement about Merriman, scholars of White can take two primary threads of connectivity—(1.) the transformation of inherited material to suit the political interests of the author, and (2.) sexuality. We see evidence for first point throughout the texts and revisions I have cited. White took the inherited Arthurian material and, like Arthurian authors before him, molded the narrative to comment on contemporary concerns. The second point is only made clear when paired with the Malorian text that precedes White’s citation of the Cúirt An Mheán

Oíche. Because of White’s preoccupation with the sexuality of the Morgause-figure and her connections to Constance White, his mother, and his choosing to pair the Malorian scene of

Arthur’s seduction by Morgause with this poem about sexuality, there is clearly something more at work here. A final point about Merriman, the overall significance of his couplet in the prologue of The Witch in the Wood (thus, setting the tone for the book): also edited out of the

The Queen of Air and Darkness was White’s direct citation and use of a poem by Aodhagán Ó

Rathaille, whose work Kiberd equates to Merriman’s in that “the passive, fainting fair-haired virgin of Ó Rathaille’s aislingí may represent the emerging eighteenth-century illusion of womanhood, but she had little enough connection with the older Celtic world”; Merriman complicates this figure in his aisling (184). And by calling upon both figures, White complicates his textual work as well.

Even in The Queen of Air and Darkness, which no longer utilizes the quotation from

Cúirt An Mheán Oíche and the use of Scots is edited, White portrays the clan as, in effect, hyper-

Gaelic. Among other interpolations of Gaelic identity, they are instructed by the Merlin-foil, St.

Toirdealbhach. This saint does not appear in any previous representations of Arthurian legend because it is White’s interpolation of himself—Toirdealbhach is the Irish form of Terrence and

White signs several of his letters to Potts with this pseudonym. Several books later, the Orkney brothers will be equated—with striking anachronism—to a “race, now represented by the Irish

Republican Army… flayed defenders of a broken heritage…[that] had been enslaved… by the foreign people whom Arthur represented” (519). And there’s that word race again, drawing attention to the fact that White considered the Gaels to be a different race than the Norman

Arthur or the Saxon Robin Wood.12

However, despite the Gaelicness of their portrayal, when the four Orkney brothers first appear, in the The Queen of Air and Darkness, they incorporate the exact words of the Anglo-

Norman Malory into their family history. In the first chapter, they are huddling together, regaling each other with the story of their “Granny,” the Countess Igraine of Cornwall, and her capture by

“the blackhearted, southeron, faithless King of the Dragon” (White’s words), Uther.13 Gwaine explains that “King Uther Pendragon was wonderly wroth” (215 in White, 1.19 in Malory),14 and

Gareth continues the direct quotation of Malory by stating “the king pight many pavilions, and there was great war made on both parties, and much people slain” (215 in White, 1.38-39 in

Malory).15 Kurth Sprague addresses this direct appropriation of source material, but does not analyze it. In his article in Arthuriana, he gives a broad synopsis of the material from Malory that appears in The Once and Future King and from which Malorian book it was drawn. From

12 Robin Wood is a representation of Robin Hood in The Sword in the Stone. White presents him as a Saxon woodsman who is, of course, exceptional at archery. 13 Cornwall is another culturally Gaelic area in Southwest England. 14 White modernizes the spelling of Malory in his text. In the original, this line reads: “he [Uther] was wonderly wrothe” (1.19). 15 Again, the original reads: “…and ther he pyght many pavelyons. And there was grete warre made on bothe partyes and moche peple slayne” (1.37-38).

Book 1, Sprague notes that “by means of a highly-colored conversation among the Orkney children, the readers is … given the facts contained in Malory’s Book I concerning the circumstances surrounding Arthur’s birth” (49). Sprague does not consider the significance of this use, just that it exists. Sprague provides that this use of a precursor text is clearly marked in

White’s text. The more interesting problem, I propose, is why did White choose to use Malory in this context? White effectively uses the precursor text to portray dialogue between four young men who are deeply loyal to their family, their Gaelic heritage, and their obligation to perpetuate the grudge stemming from their betrayal by the Englishmen. Among the “four things… that a

Lothian cannot trust,” Agravaine enumerates “an Englishman’s laugh” (216)—setting up the tension between the Scottish clan and Arthur’s Norman court.

Malory’s Arthur, the very source from which White drew the story of the clan, was obviously English and it isn’t hard to detect its anti-Gaelic tones—especially when the work is read in its cultural context. In Malory’s work, Arthur and Morgause, who is also the mother of the Orkney clan, begot Mordred incestuously. Mordred is the bastard stepbrother and cousin of

Morgause’s sons by Lot, King of Orkney.16 Malory’s Mordred becomes the villain; whereas, in the contemporary Chronica gentis scottorum—produced only a century before Malory’s

Arthur—, the Scottish John of Fordun argues, as Alan Lupack notes, that Gawaine and Mordred were robbed of the throne (Lupack 41). John of Fordun writes:

Now, on the death of Uther, King of the Britons, by poison, through the perfidy of the Saxons…, his son Arthur, by the contrivance of certain men, succeeded to the kingdom; which nevertheless was, not lawfully his due, but rather his sister Anna’s, or her children’s. For she was begotten in lawful wedlock, and married to loth, a Scottish consul, and lord of Laudonia (Lothian)… who begat two sons—the noble Galwanus and Modred …[John then relates some of Arthur’s reign and the political turbulence] Modred stirred up against Arthur that war wherein both met their fate.

16 Like anything in Arthurian legend, it is difficult to definitively ascribe any one character a specific relationship, characteristic, or geographic location. In other sources, Lot is king of Orkney and Lothian (or one or the other), and sometimes, Norway.

Geoffroy [of Monmouth], however, writes that Modred and Galwanus were the sons of Anna, sister of Aurelius, Arthur’s uncle… But it is clearly certain that neither Aurelius nor Uther survived up to that time; therefore, we may gather that Arthur was this uncle of his. That is Geoffroy’s account. I, however, refer this point to the sagacity of the reader to deal with; for I do not see my way easily to bring these passages into harmony with each other. But I believe it to be nearer the truth that Modred, as I have read elsewhere, was Arthur’s sister’s son… (100-103)

Thus, John does not portray Mordred as the villain, but rather as the party wronged by the

(usually heroic) English King Arthur. The Mordred figure and his “rebellion” can be read as an assertion of Gaelic nationalism during a time of English hegemony towards the North. In comparison, the English Malory redeems Arthur, despite the mass infanticide carried out at his behest in order to remove Mordred, and condemns Mordred unequivocally. Even the adulterous

Lancelot and Guinevere ascend to heaven at the end of Malory. Arthur dies and goes to Avalon.

While it is not explicitly mentioned what becomes of Mordred after the battle, it can be assumed that he is not taken to Avalon, nor does he perform a final saintly miracle, filling the room with a lovely scent as Lancelot was said to have done. No, the Scottish Mordred was probably damned to hell for patricide.17

White’s choice to use the Scots language, the untranslated Merriman, and Malory’s text in the context of the Orkney clan complicates these figures, similarly to his use of the Vulgate Cycle in the Lancelot example. To make full sense of the import of this for the depiction of the Orkney clan, we have to also take into account White’s interest in Gaelic concerns, especially pertaining to his Irish heritage—as suggested by source criticism. Given his knowledge of Malory, and his oscillating sensitivity and racism towards Gaelic, at least Irish, peoples and concerns, the oddities of his initial representations of Lancelot and the Orkney brothers point towards something interesting at work here.

17 In fact, though his politics are not particularly concerned with Celtic plight one way or the other, Dante places Mordred in the ninth circle in Inferno for treachery to kin, alluding to “non quelli a cui fu rotto il petto e l’ombra con esso un colpo per la man d’Artù” (Inf. XXXII.61-2).

CHAPTER 4 LANCELOT, LORD TENNYSON & DUTY AS FATAL WEAKNESS, OR FINDING THAT WHICH CANNOT BE FOUND, A CONCLUSION

There is another instance that is key to White’s Lancelot, and to understanding White’s overarching criticism of chivalry, inherent in Lancelot’s character. The first instance is the allusion to the French material that I have already started to unpack. The second is White’s depiction of Lancelot’s medieval nature. On several occasions, White directly labels Lancelot as

“medieval.” In Chapter Six of The Ill-Made Knight, White describes that Lancelot is more than

“an ugly young man who was good at games,” in fact, “he was a knight with a medieval respect for honor” (338). Lancelot considered this medieval respect for honor, “to have a Word,” “to be the most valuable of possessions” (339). (Incidentally, White derives the explanation for this medieval honor from “farmers…in Ireland [who use it] as praise or compliment” [339], which again, points to White’s oscillating relationship with Ireland.) Later on, White begins to reveal that Lancelot’s medievalness might not be entirely consistently medieval. Lancelot continues to lament his lost virginity, “for he put a higher value on chastity than is fashionable in our century.

He believed, like the man in Lord Tennyson, that people could only have the strength of ten on account of their hearts being pure. It so happened that his strength was as the strength of ten, and such was the medieval explanation which had been discovered for it” (368). Here White does not use the adjective ‘medieval’ to directly describe Lancelot—though it describes the explanation for his strength; however, this line does point even the casual reader towards the blending of

Tennyson’s Victorian chivalry and the chivalry of Malory (and his sources). To a casual reader,

White develops Lancelot essentially as a “medieval” knight but on closer inspection, we can see that White is critical of medieval chivalric culture in a way that may have anticipated modern notions and revisions of chivalry. Much of White’s third and fourth books deal extensively with

Lancelot and his relationship with Guinevere. At a time when Lancelot felt his “sentiment for

Guinevere was an ignoble sentiment,” White explains that “to a medieval nature like Lancelot’s, with its fatal weakness for loving the highest when he saw it, this was a position of pain” (387).

Here, White is claiming explicit medievalness for Lancelot’s nature. And yet, this declaration of

Lancelot’s ‘medieval nature’ is not as simple as that, because its source isn’t medieval.

The precursor text from which White draws this line is Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. White mentioned Tennyson’s treatment of Guinevere, as opposed to Malory’s less kind treatment of her, in a letter to Potts from October of 1939 (Warner 150), establishing that White was familiar with Tennyson’s Idylls. In the poem-chapter Guinevere, the eponymous queen provides an exegesis for her relationship with Lancelot, and her regret that she “could not breathe in that fine air,/ That pure severity of perfect light—/ [she] yearn’d for warmth and color which

[she] found/ In Lancelot” (Tennyson 239–40). She explains that she felt unworthy to be in the company of King Arthur, whom she then extols as “the highest and most human, too,/ Not

Lancelot, nor another” (240). Her soliloquy ends with lines from which White must have surely drawn:

What might I not have made of thy fair world, Had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest; We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot, nor another. (240)

As with his chivalric quest, Lancelot’s words are lifted from a precursor text. In this case, an element of White’s claim that Lancelot has a medieval nature comes from a 19th century text, in which Guinevere is speaking about how Lancelot is not the highest knight; rather, it is Arthur whom she must love. While the philological parallel is not as correlative in this instance as it is in the ‘seeking that which cannot be found’ examples, the thematic correlation, which is somewhat philologically derived, is present. White’s use of terms and key words in this

statement, such as ‘loving the highest’ and ‘duty’ correlate to Tennyson’s ‘thy highest creature’ and, indeed, a sense of duty. Additionally, Guinevere speaks, as Lancelot was described to have been, from a position of pain.

The intertexts multiply and chain together here: White sets up a wrapping of medievalness that can be taken at face value— ‘to a medieval nature such as Lancelot’s’— but then undermines this declaration by using an incongruous precursor text, which we may again assume would have been familiar to someone steeped in the medieval literature and its modern revisions.

Like the representation of Dame World, White swathes an empty vessel with the same gaudy trappings that Bernard of Clairvaux accused the 12th century knights of donning. To the casual reader, Sir Lancelot du Lac certainly seems a medieval figure. He seeks that which cannot be found; he is the best knight on unattainable chivalric quest. But his quest is ultimately hollow and incomplete—he does not succeed in attaining the Grail and his chivalric successes amount to aiding the destruction of Camelot. Malory also includes this critique of chivalry—the best knight loves the queen and the kingdom falls. Malory also pulls from precursor texts. The difference between Malory’s and White’s uses of precursor texts is that White wrote in a time when the incorporation of precursor texts was done out of significance, as opposed to the medieval method of literary production. In modern literature, in general, authors do not use precursor texts without intending to make a pointed allusions, whereas in the middle ages, recycling plots and phrases was not literarily significant as much as it was a cultural norm and expectation. White describes

Lancelot’s nature as ‘medieval’ but he informs the knight with modern paradoxes and ironies of intertexuality which are not medieval because—ironically—they are transhistorical parodies of medieval method. My argument has sought to show that White was discerning and educated

enough to select parts of the Arthurian legend to augment his criticisms, therefore, his sycretic

Lancelot, imbued with Lancelots (and Guineveres) of the Medieval and Victorian period, does not reveal an author unable to control his sources, but rather an author fulfilling his agenda. And

White’s agenda comments on modern and medieval chivalry: it is that which cannot be found.

The ideal of chivalry rarely reflected true medieval knighthood—Malory understood this to some extent—and the fatality of this misunderstood chivalry manifests in England before and during

WWII.

In addition to complicating Lancelot’s character, the appearance of Tennyson’s line indicates White’s criticism of the socio-cultural idea of ‘duty’ in England before and during

World War II. If White’s line is juxtaposed with Tennyson’s then White is saying that chivalric

‘duty’ is ‘fatal weakness.’ Guinevere speaks of loving the highest as a duty; Lancelot speaks of loving the highest as a fatal weakness and a position of pain. Therefore, given White’s self- expressed disdain for war, yet occasional guilt for not aiding the English war effort, he adds yet another critique of the individual’s duty to authority. The fatal duty facing the young ‘knights’ of

England in the early 20th century was that of World War II and, before that, World War I.

Lancelot’s fatal duty contributed to the collapse of the utopian Camelot. Through obvious and veiled episodes in The Once and Future King, White touts his anti-war stance and his lament for the utopian potential of Europe in the 19th century ruined by the World Wars.

The final book of The Once and Future King depicts Arthur requesting a young page,

Tom of Newbold Revell near Warrick (Thomas Malory, as I have mentioned earlier), to abstain from the upcoming battle with Mordred “to tell everybody that would listen about this ancient idea [i.e., chivalry], which both of them had once thought good,” but which in the end had failed

(636). During the period in which White was writing this book, World War II had loomed and

then broken out in Europe. The chivalric themes of Might and Right with which Arthur grapples throughout the tetralogy are, unmistakably and anachronistically, relevant to this historical context. The final words of the book references a tenet of Arthurian legend that the king will return to England in times of crisis: “explicit liber regis quondam regisque futuri” (639).1 Using

Arthurian legend, White proposes the answer not only to the impossibly ideal medieval chivalric code, but also to the political crises of modern Europe. And here is where the geese of Arthur’s

Sword in the Stone-youth come back in:

There would be a day—there must be a day—when he [Arthur] would come back to Gramarye with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none—a table without boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there. The hope of making it would lie in culture. If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason. (639)

White continues this rationale in a 1940 letter to Potts, in which he proposes that “the central theme of Morte d’Arthur [sic] is to find an antidote to war” (Warner 178). The time during which

Malory wrote was a similarly tumultuous period for the English people. The Hundred Years War

(1337–1453), between France and England, had just concluded and England was entering a time of internal strife known as the War of the Roses (1455–1485). The English people looked to stories, such as those of Arthur, for nationalistic reassurance. If a story is important enough to be passed down, it resonates with a national (or international) audience and the Arthuriad is one of those stories. Arthur’s conceived utopia could not endure and it seemed that Europe was falling to forces of Might over Right. White offers a critique of Might, even Might for Right, at a time when Might and Might for Right were being called into question in England and on an unprecedented global scale. In order to provide a comfort to the English people, “Malory’s immediate purpose was to create a type of the ideal knight and the foremost among all of

1 Trans: “Here ends the book of the once and future king”.

Arthur's knights. His larger purpose was to show Lancelot and the court to which he belonged in a prelapsarian state, preceding and tragically contrasting with the corruption and downfall to come” (Hartung 252). Whether it was Arthur’s sin of incest and Mordred or Lancelot and

Guinevere’s transgression, ultimately, it was Might, despite Arthur’s attempt to use Might for

Right, which destroyed Camelot. Like Camelot, Europe in the 19th century appeared to have had a utopian potential; however, Might had destroyed that in the 20th century. But hope, as White points out, lays in civilization, and through a renewed understanding of the concepts of Might and Right, in both modern and medieval contexts. T.H. White resurrected Arthur with the aim of giving hope to the English people in their time of greatest need, just as Arthur himself was promised to do. Gallix describes White’s time in Ireland as vexing for him because he “could never quite reconcile himself with the idea that he was taking no active part in the war activities… But there were other periods where he could not stand the war propaganda” (93).

White eventually came to view the writing of The Once and Future King, as “an anecdote to war”—as, fundamentally, his contribution to the war effort. In the nineteenth century, in order to help unite the principalities, Germany adopted the Nibelungenlied as its national literature. This spurred other European nations to find the commonality of their peoples through a shared literature. France looked to the Chanson de Roland and Norway, Iceland and other Scandinavian countries touted the Norse Sagas, such as Egil’s Saga, The Laxadaela Saga and Njal’s Saga.

Each of these texts provided a point of pride, as well as a common mythological heritage by which to rally and unite the nation that it represented. In the first half of the twentieth century, as in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the English people needed a figure like Arthur behind which to rally. White joins Lewis and Tolkien in offering the English peoples a myth of national self-invention and –reliance—steeped in lore and nostalgia, but culturally reflexive of the

contemporary period. And, as important, a myth whose relations to its sources were deeply troubled.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Emerson Storm Fillman Richards loves learning and for that she has been called a dilettante. Her undergraduate degrees are in English (summa cum laude) and Medieval Studies

(magna cum laude) with a minor in geography. In 2009, she lived in Germany briefly; this was a major life event. From her experiences abroad, she produced two publications of travel writing & journalism—a field of which she intends to continue the noble pursuit. Her graduate degree is in

English Literature, though during the course of this degree she also studied French and Breton language and literature. Her academic interests range from Dante to Lolita, from Jules Verne to the Celtic material. Her interests are more or less interrelated. She enjoys making films on 16 and

8mm and owns several projectors.

Emerson has lived in Gainesville, Florida since January of 2006; she has grown to love the town and a few of the people. In the Fall of 2013, she will attend Indiana University

Bloomington to pursue a PhD in Comparative Literature, focusing on the medieval vernacular literature and culture of the British Isles and France. She and her cat, Furry Jesus, are looking forward to the adventure, to test their strength and heartiness, like knights, seeking that which they cannot find.